ASHBURN — Duke Howell can still hear the breathing on the other end of his headset. The former Sun Valley High School offensive coordinator, stationed up in the coaches’ box, often found himself yelling into the microphone as he chastised the player below for a mistake on the field. Those outbursts usually were met with near-silence. Only the faint sounds of breathing coming from the sideline.
Sam Howell — Duke’s son — was never the type to talk back in those situations, his father says. The quarterback would listen, take the criticism and then go about his business.
“He always, as far as I can remember him playing, especially (at) the high school level,” Duke says, “was relatively calm.”
Want to know why Howell wasn’t fazed when the famously blunt-spoken Eric Bieniemy, the Washington Commanders new offensive coordinator, yelled at him this spring for failing to chase back an interception in practice? Or why the second-year quarterback wasn’t one of the players who went to coach Ron Rivera with questions about Bieniemy’s demanding coaching style?
Thank Howell’s dad.
This season, nothing is arguably more crucial to the Commanders’ on-field success than the pairing of Howell and Bieniemy. Forget new owner Josh Harris, Rivera needing to win in a must-win year or any of the other fascinating subtexts percolating through the season that begins at home Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals.
For the Commanders, the relationship between the 22-year-old starter and the veteran assistant coach will largely determine how the 2023 campaign plays out.
Howell, an unproven fifth-rounder with only one career start, is getting his first full shot at proving he can be a viable NFL quarterback. Bieniemy, despite a decorated resume that includes a couple of Super Bowl wins with the Kansas City Chiefs, has yet to land a head coaching job, hence his venture to Washington.
The pairing, so far, looks like a natural fit. Howell has had a lifetime of preparation for a coach like Bieniemy. The intensity, the fire that can be heard all across the fields of the team’s headquarters in Ashburn? They remind Howell of a former probation officer and small-city North Carolina high school coach who understood that sometimes good wasn’t good enough.
“My dad was probably harder on me than EB was,” Howell told The Washington Times.
‘Purposefully harder’
“I don’t want to make it sound like my dad was just killing me my whole life.”
Sam Howell smiles as he makes that point clear. And Duke, in a separate conversation, agrees: This wasn’t the Junction Boys with Bear Bryant, he quips. But you don’t get to the NFL without a strong work ethic, and since that was his son’s goal from an early age, Duke was determined to push as much as he needed to maximize the boy’s potential.
By middle school, Howell was getting out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to lift weights at the nearby high school where Duke coached. “I would tell him it’s a long, hard road,” Duke said. And so, Howell — with kids years older than him — would participate in those early morning sessions.
Duke, who became his son’s offensive coordinator in high school, firmly believed the quarterback — especially one who was the coach’s son — needed to be willing to take more criticism than the next guy.
“Perception is reality and sometimes you have to be purposefully harder on him,” Duke said.
During Howell’s freshman year, Duke spent the season calling plays from the sideline. “And then I never did it again,” he said. By the following fall, Duke moved up to the coaches’ box with the belief that he could keep his emotions more in check.
“He’s always challenged me,” Howell said. “Obviously, he’s not as hard on me anymore just because he’s not really coaching me. But really, as long as I can remember, he’s always pushed me to be my best.”
The lessons went beyond X’s and O’s. Howell’s even-keel composure — a poise that helped convinced Washington’s coaches to hand him the starting job — can be traced in part to his father making sure the young quarterback was aware of every detail, even his body language. He’d emphasize that recruiters — and teammates — were watching and looking for cues. A calm quarterback instills confidence.
And if Dad needed backup, there was Mom. If Howell tried to make excuses, he heard about it from his mother. Duke remembers how Howell once got upset after a baseball coach moved him to the bottom of the batting order after he missed a few games because of his commitment to football. Amy Howell, a former collegiate volleyball player, told her son that if he wanted to bat at the top of the lineup, he was just going to have to prove himself all over.
“We were never the parents to say, ‘Well, let me go talk to the coach,’” Duke said. “It’s like, ‘Earn it.’”
Prepping for Bieniemy
Howell brought that earn-it mindset with him to the NFL. When the North Carolina product got wind that Bieniemy was coming to Washington, he dove into the ins and outs of Kansas City’s offense.
Howell was a fan of Patrick Mahomes, of course, like practically everyone. But when he began studying Kansas City film, he zeroed in on how Mahomes looks over the defense before the snap and where his eyes go when the action begins. Howell took note of the routes, the footwork and the intricacies that have made the Chiefs one of the best offenses in football.
Then Howell began applying what he’d seen: He set up an offseason program to work on Kansas City-style techniques and concepts — even before Beniemy, who was hired in February, had a chance to formally share those methods in the spring.
Howell knew the Commanders wanted to give him every opportunity to be the team’s starter. He planned to earn it.
“He was prepared for it, but now it’s, ‘Hey, man, we’ve been talking about this day since you were 14, right?’” said Anthony Boone, Howell’s personal quarterbacks coach. “So now it’s time to — all the talk, all the hours, all the late nights, all the early mornings — now it’s time to channel that into what EB wants you to do, what Coach Rivera wants you to do and what the team needs you to do to win week in and week out.”
Three times a week, Howell scheduled special workouts designed to get him ready for a Bieniemy-style offense, a different specialty for each day.
First day: short and intermediate throws. On the second day, deeper routes. To close out the week, red zone work. The sessions were timed to mimic Kansas City’s offensive rhythm, and Howell dedicated himself to replicating some of the footwork and routes the quarterback saw on tape.
By the time Bieniemy finally got a chance to install his offense this spring, Howell was ready. Specifically, he thinks back to the installation of “Jet Chip Wasp” — a play that fueled Kansas City’s comeback in Super Bowl LIV against the San Francisco 49ers. Howell remembered watching the viral clip of Mahomes asking Bieniemy if they had time to run “Wasp,” so the 22-year-old recognized it right away.
Bieniemy could tell Howell put in the hours.
“I saw a kid who was just highly interested in what we’re doing and how are we doing it,” Bieniemy said. “You knew he was going to take everything home.”
From there, Bieniemy made sure Howell had the right materials. Even before the quarterback had full access to this year’s playbook, Bieniemy prepared a 25- to 30-page binder of his scheme’s base foundations for Howell. Once meetings and practices started, Bieniemy noticed Howell ask smart, intuitive questions — as well as injecting his own opinions. “Like most quarterbacks, they want to be right,” Bieniemy grins.
Boone, meanwhile, pointed out an observation about Bieniemy that also provided insight into how the assistant works with a still-developing quarterback. As much as Bieniemy harps about details — and he does, to be clear — the coordinator gives the quarterback flexibility in areas like his footwork. If a play, for instance, calls for a 3-step drop, Howell has the freedom to get to three steps in a myriad of ways.
That differed from last year’s staff, Boone said.
“One thing you learn in this industry, you have to remain flexible,” Bieniemy said. “Everybody’s not the same entity. So you got to be able to adapt and adjust and make sure that you can do what that player can do. That way it can make your system work.”
Pushing buttons
Last month, Rivera created a firestorm when he told reporters that his players had come to him with questions about Bieniemy’s intensity.
The coach admitted he probably shouldn’t have brought the matter up, but the point he was trying to make was that he encouraged his group to speak with the coordinator directly to better understand his ways.
Those kinds of conversations weren’t necessary for Howell. From the beginning, Rivera said he could tell Howell and Bieniemy “very quickly” had a sense of how to work off each other.
“You can see that EB knows how to push his buttons to get the best out of Sam in terms of competitive situations in practice,” Rivera said. “He’ll make a comment to Sam about something, and you can see Sam go ‘Ah, OK’ and he’s gotten to Sam and Sam’s going again.”
“It definitely meshes better than you would probably think,” Howell says.
To have that sort of dynamic, Bieniemy and Howell agree there needs to be an understanding that it comes from only the best place. As much as Bieniemy can get on players, he also yells “Great job!” and other compliments when he’s happy with the result. “He wants what’s best for you,” Howell said.
Duke tried to strike the same balance when he coached his son.
“Sometimes it [wasn’t] the easiest for me to separate being his dad and being his coach,” Duke said.
As a coach, Duke can see how far his son has come. Over the last year-and-a-half, the signal-caller has gone from a prospect who slid deep in the draft to now the first quarterback of the Harris era.
Howell has been careful to avoid conversations about expectations or what he would consider as a successful year for him personally.
Still, his profile around the league is on the way up — and will rise more the better he plays for the Commanders.
Coming from a Korean heritage — his father is half Korean, with Howell’s late grandmother born in South Korea — Howell said he hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what his status as an Asian quarterback could mean if he has a breakout year.
But he said it would “mean a lot,” adding he remembers how he and his dad thought it would be “super cool” to even have the opportunity to be a high-profile quarterback with Korean heritage.
There’s still so much left to prove for Howell, but at the very least, his dad gets to watch his son live out his dream.
“His goal he had — there’s only 32 guys that do that on Sundays,” Duke said. “But if he wanted to get there, we would try to give him every opportunity.”
Even if that meant an extra push.
• Matthew Paras can be reached at mparas@washingtontimes.com.
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